Field Service Management Guide: Telecommunications Timeline

Telecommunication is the ability to send information over long distances. It’s the way we communicate with each other, whether we’re down the street or across the world. Telecommunications have been around since the earliest days of humanity, though the technology has changed a lot since then. Looking back, we can see how far communication has come.
Prehistoric Era: In prehistoric times, people communicated through simple means. Options to send information to other groups of people were very limited. They used smoke signals, drums, and horns to alert others of danger or guide them to a destination.

6th Century B.C.: In the 6th century, kings communicated with neighboring cities or kingdoms by using messengers who traveled from place to place to deliver messages in person. Originally, only royalty and the well-to-do could use messengers, but as time passed, messenger services became more available to everyone.

5th Century B.C.: People used pigeons to send messages back and forth to others in nearby cities. Pigeons were well-known for their homing abilities, so they could be trained to carry tiny messages strapped to their legs, then return home.

4th Century B.C.: Semaphores, signaling devices with movable parts, were once used as a means of communicating. One type of semaphore used a container of water, within which was a rod that contained symbols. The water could be drained to a certain point on the rod, revealing the code the receiver would interpret. The sender and receiver of the coded message resided on two different hills, each with their own vessels of water. A signal of fire indicated that they needed to begin draining the water in their vessels. The second fire signal indicated when it was time to stop draining and read the code.

490 B.C.: In the Battle of Marathon, they used shield signals to communicate. The concept was to have the bright sun’s rays bounce off of a shiny, polished shield to send an alert to others. There is no agreement on what the signals used during that battle actually meant.

15th Century: Flag semaphores are used as a visual type of telegraphy. Waving flags in certain positions represented a specified set of codes. Flags were often used to communicate between marine vessels.

1672: The first acoustic, mechanical telephones, otherwise known as “string phones,” communicated over long distances through the vibrations of a wire. Robert Hooke developed the first acoustic phone for transmitting music through an extended string connected to two cylinders.

1867: Signal lamps would use a similar system to Morse code to send messages to others. These lamps would send short or long dashes of light to convey information. Philip Colomb, of the British Royal Navy, was the first person to put this type of code system into place.

1877: Thomas Edison worked on two popular inventions: the telephone and the telegraph. In 1877, he got the idea that one could speak into a machine and have the words recorded and played back. He had one of those machines built to his specifications, and the acoustic phonograph was born. The recording device became popular and was used for many purposes, like taking dictation and recording music.

1838: Samuel Morse created the telegraph to send electrical pulses over a wire connecting two stations together, sending a message between them. The telegraph used his Morse code to communicate. A line was eventually laid from the U.S. to Europe, allowing messages to be sent across the Atlantic Ocean much faster than traditional methods of the time.

1858: In 1858, the first cable was laid to connect the United States and Britain for sending and receiving telegraph messages. This was a difficult task that ran into many complications. Once they found the right kind of cable to use, it ended up being too large for one ship to carry, so they had to use a second ship to help transport it, requiring the two ships to work in sync to get the cable to its destination.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell was the inventor of the first telephone, although another device like it was also created at around the same time by Elisha Gray. Bell and Gray fought a legal battle over the rights to the phone, and Bell won. Bell created it with the idea that one could send their voice through an electric cable to another person on another similar device. He partnered with Thomas Watson to help get his vision created.

1880: The photophone used a beam of light to transmit sound, much like our modern-day fiber-optic cables. Alexander Graham Bell and assistant Charles Sumner Tainter developed the photophone system. It enabled them to send a wireless voice message from the top of the Franklin School to the Bell laboratory.

1893: The ability to transmit electrical signals without the use of any wires is called wireless telegraphy. Nikola Tesla invented the first wireless telegraphy system, which used radio waves instead of wires, in 1893. Guglielmo Marconi also invented a similar wireless system at around the same time, and Marconi ultimately made more money from his invention due to the connections that his family had.

1896: Radio: The invention of the radio came about because of the work of many inventors in the areas of electromagnetism and wireless telegraphy. Marconi built the first commercially successful wireless telegraphy machine. His device used hertzian waves, invented by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, to transmit signals over long distances. Improvements on this machine over the years made it into the radios that Americans enjoy listening to news and music on today.

1914: Starting in 1885, telephone lines were laid for a phone system at New York City. Over many years, the lines kept extending farther west until the transatlantic system was finally completed in 1914. It was at that point, that Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T at that time, made a test call. Then, the first personal call was made on the transatlantic line by Bell to his assistant Watson. The distance between them was 3,400 miles.

1927: Many inventors in the 1800s had ideas to create a system that we now call television. Nothing came from their visions until 1927, when a young man named Philo T. Farnsworth brought his vision of using radio waves to project an image onto a screen to life. He demonstrated his television system to the media, but his first public demonstration didn’t come until the 1930s.

1927: The first intercontinental call was placed to Sir Evelyn Murray of the U.K. from Walter S. Gifford of the U.S. The device that made it possible was the radiotelephone. This machine used radio waves to transmit audio messages to a specified destination.

1930: The concept of a videophone involves transmitting live video with voice communications. The first experimental videophone was a two-way television-telephone system. Bell labs spent years developing this concept for telecommunications and broadcast entertainment, but it wasn’t for many more years that it started to come out for public use.

1934: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.S.-Japan– The first commercial radiotelephone call to cross the Pacific was placed from the Dixon, CA, transmitting station to the station in Komuro, Japan. Making a call across such a long distance was a monumental achievement, even though the quality of the calls wasn’t that good.

1936: Dr. Georg Schubert, a German inventor, developed a public videophone network using mechanical television scanning on 8-inch-square display screens. This device transmitted about 40,000 pixels per frame at 25 frames per second.

1946: In 1946, Southwestern Bell developed a system to send and receive phone calls in automobiles. A foreman for the company made the first call testing their device. They placed the device in the trunk of the car, but it filled the trunk and left little room for anything else.

1956: A transatlantic telephone cable runs under the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and it was placed in 1956, increasing the speed of communication across the ocean. A message carried by ship could take as many as ten days, whereas a telegraph message delivered through this cable could arrive in less than a day.

1962: NASA, AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and other organizations joined to create a commercial communications satellite system. The first satellite, launched by NASA in 1962, transmitted data across the Pacific Ocean.

1964: In 1964, Charles Kao and George Hockham started the drive to implement fiber-optic technology by publishing their theories. They had the idea that there would be much less light loss in glass fibers if they could remove any impurities, though it took years for the technology to catch up with their ideas.

1965: The first North American public videophone network launched in 1965. It was first shown to the public and tested on selected people at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, and feedback from those participants was used to improve the technology.

1969: ARPANET was the first network to connect computers together. It launched in October of 1969, and soon, other networks popped up online. ARPANET was thought to be the largest computer network for general computing purposes at that point in time.

1973: On April 3, 1973, the first cellphone call came from Marty Cooper of Motorola, placed to Joel S. Engel. The prototype used for that call weighed more than two pounds, a far cry from the phones we use today, which weigh just a few ounces.

1979: In 1979, the International Maritime Satellite Organization was founded. It created a satellite system for the maritime community that enabled ships to call for help or get weather information quickly. INMARSAT continued to develop over the years using newer technologies and machinery.

1983: ARPANET started using the newest technology on the block, TCP, or transmission control protocol, becoming a part of the early Internet. Over time, the Internet would grow to offer more than just research opportunities, from chat programs and photos to downloads of field service management software to help keep track of inventories and schedules.

1998: The company Iridium developed the first satellite hand-held phones, which allowed users to place calls by bouncing their transmissions off of satellites in places where no phone lines or cell towers exist.

2003: As telephone technology continued to grow, so did the devices used to make phone calls. Once the Internet and personal computers became more common, VOIP came about. VOIP stands for voice over Internet protocol, and this technology allows people to make voice calls over the Internet.